When you access an CMP entity bean, does it have to be within a transaction or can it be done outside, ie readonly?

I have am developing an application where I have a number of statless session beans and a number of CMP entity beans. The session beans is is just a layer hiding the entity beans from my jsp pages. Some methods in my session beans are updating the entity beans, but most of them are just reading the entity beans and transfering their values to the jsp pages.

Currently I access everything using the "Required" transaction attribute. I then receivs a number of deadlocks. However if I tries to use for example the "NotSupported" transaction attribute I receive problem accessing CMR field attributes in the entity beans.

How to get the deadlocks to disapear.I do not need the transactions as I most of the times does only reading.